Pilgrimages secular and sacred

Sarah Vowell and Jack Hitt tell of their travels in search of slain presidents and a killer saint

May 29, 2005|By David Kirby, the author, most recently, of the collection "The Ha-Ha."

Assassination Vacation

By Sarah Vowell

Simon & Schuster, 258 pages, $21

Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain

By Jack Hitt

Simon & Schuster, 255 pages, $13 paper

As she travels the country visiting sites associated with the killings of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley in her new book "Assassination Vacation," Sarah Vowell never meets a guide or curator she doesn't like. Saying "docent" to Vowell is like saying "Sinatra" to a bobby-soxer: Her pulse rate climbs, her breathing speeds up and she begins to pat her fingertips together hungrily.

When she visits the museum of the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York, where "an irritating young maniac" named Charles Guiteau went to take advantage of that group's open-door policy on sex relations, she meets guide Joe Valesky and gushes:

"Someday, I hope to be just like him. There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: 'It was on this spot . . .' "

It's hard to blame her; after all, Valesky is the one who tells Vowell that Guiteau was so spectacularly unsuccessful as a Romeo that the Oneidans nicknamed him " 'Charles Gitout.' " Now, everybody who made a B or above in high school history remembers that Guiteau later shot Garfield in the back and killed him, but only the Joe Valeskys of the world can tell you the assassin's nickname.

Why traipse around after the ghosts of our first three assassinated presidents in the first place, though? Without the details, Vowell says, one's "rickety patriotism . . . can get a little ethereal and abstract." You visit a site because, "It's reassuring to be able to go look at something real, something you can put your hands on (though you might want to wash them afterward)."

Not all visits are equally thrilling, of course. Vowell likes to drag other people around with her to see if they react the way she does; with a triumphant " 'Ta-da!' " she shows her friend Bennett the plaque that alludes in bureaucratic language to conspirator William Powell's bloody Bowie-knife attack on William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state. But Bennett just rolls his eyes, and the verb " 'Seward plaqued' " enters the narrative as code language for "disappointed."

Like Jack Hitt in the new paperback reissue of his 1994 book "Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim's Route Into Spain," Vowell is interested in relics. She visits the Muetter Museum in Philadelphia to eyeball something that looks like "a crumpled paper towel" floating in a glass jar labeled " 'Piece of John Wilkes Booth, Assassin of President Lincoln.' " More than a little Seward-plaqued, Vowell gets into a discussion of relics with the museum's director, Gretchen Worden, who joins Joe Valesky in the Docents Hall of Fame when she points out that while a tooth is merely a specimen, George Washington's tooth is a relic, as is " 'a piece of the true cross' " or, for that matter, your dead mother's favorite sweater. A specimen is part of a biology lesson; a relic is part of your faith.

And the best way to keep that faith is to hit the road. Talking the talk is not enough for Vowell; she has to walk the walk as well, which leads to a bout of sea sickness (described with unseemly relish) in the course of a trip to the prison off the Florida coast where Dr. Samuel Mudd was kept following his conviction for aiding Booth. At the Lincoln home in Springfield, Ill., the 5-foot-4 Vowell triggers an alarm when she jumps up to see herself in a shaving mirror hung to frame the 6-foot-4 Lincoln's face.

She'd rather verify through on-site inspection than by sifting through dusty archives, and she concludes that Mudd was guilty despite his protestations that he didn't recognize Booth when the assassin sought care for the leg he broke when he fell to the stage after shooting the president. If she and a friend can't find Mudd's house in rural Maryland in the daylight with a lapful of maps, reasons Vowell, then "I don't see how Booth and [co-conspirator David] Herold, who were horse-back riding under the influence of the whiskey they acquired at the Surratt Tavern, could have found Mudd's house in the middle of the night if they didn't know exactly where they were going, and whom they could trust."